All posts by Chris

Logos Go Simple

You can lead the horse to water… well you know the rest. Brand development and logos are some of the most difficult tasks in the world to accomplish effectively. Many an arduous hour can be spent laboring away on revision after revision far outweighing the projected scope of work as multiple inputs change the dynamic. This is the nature of the work, however a particular trend is giving some much needed relief to designers. Simplicity.

Pushing Material Design Forward

According to material.io Google’s Material Design is: a unified system that combines theory, resources, and tools for crafting digital experiences. It’s getting harder these days to ignore it’s subtle influence on UX/UI design. Material Design’s guidelines have lead to more website’s that present clean spaces and utilize a lot of negative space to maximum effect. In the responsive world we live in today MD’s guidelines have proved to be useful for digital (both web and app) based components such as buttons, drop downs and switches which need to work well on tablets as well as phones and monitors.

We just listened to the Design Matters podcast in which Debbie Millman discusses branding with designers Greg Hahn and Ryan Moore who work at Gretel. It gave us some great insight into how they think, develop ideas and creatively engage audiences with out of the box ideas. A worthy listen for just about anyone interested in design. You can listen to the podcast here or read more about how their company rebranded Netflix.

Discount stores rarely put to much thought into house product packaging. When they do, designs are often uninspiring and well, generic. This tends to make you more hesitant about trying that brand which involves a search for origin (think Aldi and Trader Joe’s). The combination of a re-brand and packaging redesign can increase that products sales and Target seems to agree.

We recently discovered this London-based street art blog that’s full up with inspiration, Hooked shares images of street art from all over the world and delivers ideas for stencils, illustrations and screen printing. A great resource for those looking for ideas in unexpected places.

It was brought to our attention that a fellow graphic designer, Briar Levit, is crowd funding a film about the design process before the desktop computer. The title of the film is “Graphic Means: A History of Graphic Design Production”. Needless to say, we are very excited and we would like to encourage you to contribute if you can.

“Imagine designing and printing a brochure—without a computer. How would you set the type—making sure it fit your layout? How would you crop the images? How would you place those images alongside your text? And what would you hand over to the offset printer when you were done?

Up until just 30 years ago when the desktop computer debuted, this whole process would have been primarily done by hand, and with the aide of fascinating machines that used a variety of ways to get type and image on to the printed page.”

This is really big news if your a David Bowie fanatic and Chris Hess of Hess Design Solutions is just that. The V&A Museum has been granted access to the David Bowie Archive to curate the first international retrospective of the career of David Bowie. David Bowie remains one of the most pioneering and influential performers of our time. The exhibit contains more than three hundred objects, including handwritten lyrics, costumes, photos, set designs, album artwork, and rare performance material from over five decades all brought together from the David Bowie Archive for the first time.

Portland Oregon based artist Jim Kazanjian has lost his mind and his mind is a truly beautiful yet seemingly frightening place. As you can see his collage work truly sells architecture through the eyes of a mad scientist. These homes have more in common with Dr, Frankenstein than say Frank Lloyd Wright and we love it! Kazanijian has amassed a collection of around 25,000 found images from the internet, he then combines certain elements of architectural forms to craft a visually stimulating structures which evoke mystery and fantasy. We felt we needed to share these, enjoy!

Hartmut Esslinger, founder of Frog Design, is undoubtedly one of the world’s most inﬂuential designers. Mr. Esslinger explains how ‘strategic design’ in business and society can and must bring about positive change through innovative creativity with a newly released book titled “Design Forward”. This innovative progression Mr. Esslinger speaks of has sparked creative change in the consumer market, especially for one of the most successful American companies ever built: Apple. We here at Hess Design Solutions love our Apple products and while we haven’t done as much packaging design work as we would have liked to we are constantly fascinated with the it’s creation, especially the prototypical stages where ideas begin to materialize from the abstract.

We here at Hess Design Solutions stumbled upon this Christmas Gifts or Gifs recently and felt we had to share this with everyone. The web site is a quirky GIF art showcase comprised of submissions from international illustrators,animators and directors. This whimsical project was curated by Ryan Todd and built by Enjoy This. And all the while we thought the Graphics Interchange Format was dead, little did we know.